the heavy: At the age of :fifty-eight, he looks the part. Bennett resembles one of Honore Daumier's lawyer caricatures- all overfed prosperity. He glowered and raged at Jones's lawyers, Gilbert K. Da- vis and Joseph Cammarata "This case is bullshit," Bennett announced. "We're wasting our time even talking to you." But Mitchell Ettinger, Bennett's partner at the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, offered conciliatory words. "Maybe there's some way we can work this out," he said. Davis and Cammarata hoped so. At the time of the meeting, they had been representIng Jones for more than three years and had done hundreds of hours of work for which they had not yet been paid. Jones's legal fund had raised more than two hundred thousand dol- lars, but most of that money had been spent on expenses. Cammarata had been a junior tax lawyer in President Bush's Justice Department, and Davis had just waged an unsuccessful cam- paign for the Republican nomination to be Attorney General of Virginia. Neither had an especially political (or especially lucrative) law practice. The two men wanted a good deal for their client and for themselves and seemed eager to be rid of the case. Paula Jones had filed suit in May of 1994, and Bennett had spent the next three years in a well-executed stall, drag- ging out his legal maneuvering so that the case had a negligible impact on the President's reëlection campaign. But after the Supreme Court's decision Ben- nett began to consider his options for settlement. In the first round of nego- tiations, in 1996, Jones's lawyers had asked for a million four hundred thousand dollars. Bennett had rejected the request out of hand, and Davis and Cammarata had come back with a mil- lion two. Bennett again said no But when the plaintiffs attorneys indicated a willingness to accept a six- figure settlement Bennett started to pay attention. In the formal complaint, Jones had demanded seven hundred thousand dollars. Bennett said there was a POSSI- bility that he could agree to that fig- ure. Both in public and in private, he had said that he would never agree to a settlement that the President would have to payout of IDS own pocket. But Bill Clinton owned a pair of general- liability insurance policies-one with a subsidiary of Chubb and the other with State Farm-and Chubb had implied that it would pay as much as three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, as half of any settlement, to resolve the case. State Farm was balking at paying anything, but Bennett thought he might find a way to fund the other halE Davis, a fleshy good old boy, said it sounded as if they were making prog- ress. Cammarata-wiry, intense, the younger and more detail-oriented of the lawyers for Jones-said there were other conditions that had to be satisfied. Jones, he said, still wanted an apology from the President for his behavior in 1991. Never, Bennett saId: "If you want ten dollars and an apology, you're not going to get it." Jones's lawyers said that they would have to check with their client but that they thought they might have the outline of a deal: a seven- hundred-thousand-dollar payment, and a statement in which Clinton acknowl- edged no improper conduct by Jones, giving her a chance to accomplish her stated goal of "clearing her name." Cam- marata and Ettinger went downstairs to Ettinger's office, where they sat at his word processor and typed up the mutu- ally acceptable language for the state- ment. Close to midnight, the four men reconvened and agreed that progress had been made. Cammarata and Davis said they would call Paula for her approval in the morning. In her complaint Jones had asserted that she had seen "distinguishing charac- teristics in Clinton's genital area" when he purportedly exposed himself to her. Jones had signed a secret affidaVlt describing the characteristics. In the meeting with Jones's lawyers, Bennett had said, "I gotta have the affidavit. I think it's horseshit, and I want it." Bennett felt that if he could discredit the accusation about Clinton's anatomy-a subject that had drawn a great deal of amused public attention-he could cast doubt on Jones's entire case. He believed that if he could prove that there were no characteristics" he could deny that his client had admitted anything by settling. Bennett subsequently tried an en- ticement for his adversaries to produce the affidavit. "We'll show you our best evidence," he promised. Bennett and Ettinger had devoted considerable re- 53 ''Alfred Portale is the Fabergé of America's great chefs. In his hands all is surprising, beautiful, delicious." -Gael Greene . ; ". 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